588 MENTAL SCIENCE 



they were only documenting their own souls with unusual fullness 

 for the benefit of the future generalizer. Their work, suggestive 

 as it is, was precocious, and their conclusions premature, and about 

 all of it must be done over again on a larger basis of facts, and our 

 watchword must be not merely back to Kant or even Aristotle, 

 but back to a reexamination of the primitive events of soul-life, 

 gathered by the most systematic outer and inner observation, 

 and even from history, literature, experience, and wherever psy- 

 chic life is most voluminous and intense; pain, misery, famine, 

 war, revolutions, shame, revivals, every passional state in which 

 Despine says all vice and crime originate; love, fervid as 

 Dante knew it, crowds, the struggles of the individual soul with 

 besetting sin, which is the original form of dualism as experienced 

 from Paul and Augustine down to poor Weininger, who lately 

 shot himself because he could not overcome the evil within which 

 his almost Manichean system set over against his ideals of good- 

 ness. Especially as we advance from the study of sense and in- 

 tellect to that of the will and feeling, the anemic thinker, who can 

 realize in his own person so little of the stormy life of man, must 

 seek every possible contact with it. He must live where he can 

 among animals, children, defectives, the insane, criminals, pau- 

 pers, saints, sinners, the sick, the well; must know grief and joy, 

 these, as well as the clinic and the laboratory, for here he fronts 

 the bottom facts of the world. Next, he must supplement his at 

 best meager first-hand experience with the proxy experience of 

 others as recorded in books. Psychology lives not merely in the 

 study, but where doubt and belief, sanity and inherited insanity, 

 struggle together; where temptation and conscience wage their 

 wars, in the mob, the cloister; where rage, terror, and pity be- 

 come convulsive and sweep all before them, and where love of the 

 lie usurps that of the truth. Once it was thought that the study 

 of pure should precede that of applied science, but we are now 

 coming almost to reverse this maxim in education. So psychology, 

 especially in our practical age and land, must first study and teach 

 how to live, love, learn, labor; must have something to say to all 

 who reflect on reproduction, disease, health; and thus must first 

 serve man well if it would later rule him wisely. If this view be 

 correct, we must abandon many supposed certainties and finali- 

 ties, and, with faith in a future far greater than the past has been, 

 devote ourselves to severe and unremitting toil, perhaps for gen- 

 erations; must often practice that hardest of all forms of self- 

 restraint in our field, the suspense of judgment. assured that 

 in the end psychology is to become queen of those sciences that 

 deal with man, and reign among all the humanities somewhat as 

 chemistry and physics are coming to do over the material world, 



